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FILM; Sticking to It, One Way or Another

BEAUTIFUL'' may be the title of the new movie that marks her debut as a film director, but it's not an adjective Sally Field has heard much during her 36-year career in Hollywood.

''I was never pretty enough, I was never sexy enough,'' says Ms. Field, 53, in the den of her cozy, modest Brentwood home, where her two Oscars and one Emmy sit inconspicuously on a shelf next to her youngest son's sports trophies. ''Casting directors would say it to my face. I've spent a whole lot of my time being devastated. The business can be profoundly painful.''

Painful, perhaps, but not enough to deter Ms. Field, whose unusual tenacity and often fierce nature have kept her a serious player in movies and television despite the kind of adversity and petty humiliation that might have sidelined others years ago.

''It's never been easy, it's always been a struggle,'' she says of a career that ranges from the 1960's sitcoms ''Gidget'' and ''The Flying Nun'' to Oscar-winning performances in ''Norma Rae'' (1979) and ''Places in the Heart'' (1984).

''I'm the original little engine that could,'' says Ms. Field, who is indeed little at five feet two inches and 100 pounds, and whose childlike voice and easygoing demeanor belie her competitiveness. ''I simply refuse to go away.''

Ms. Field is celebrating the start of her fifth decade of refusing to go away with both ''Beautiful,'' which opens Friday and stars Minnie Driver as a driven beauty-pageant contestant, and a six-episode guest-starring stint on NBC's ''E.R.'' this fall. She will play the mother of the nurse-turned-resident Abby Lockhart. The ''E.R.'' gig, which came in the form of a personal request from the executive producer, John Wells, was a pleasant surprise. ''I can't even say what kind of character I play yet,'' she says. ''But it's an actor's dream.''

''Beautiful,'' however, came as much less of a surprise. It's the result of the same dogged, sometimes outrageous, career strategy that Ms. Field has used since 1967, when ''The Flying Nun'' ended after a three-year run and she was 21. Ms. Field faced the daunting task of convincing Hollywood that the lively young woman who had played Sister Bertrille was a serious actress worthy of film roles. ''No one wanted to see me at that point, no one,'' she says. ''That was one of the biggest walls I ever faced. Back then, there was a real stigma attached to television actors. Hardly anybody crossed over.''

Ms. Field got over that hurdle after an audacious audition with the director Bob Rafelson, when he was casting the 1976 film ''Stay Hungry.'' Ms. Field showed up at the audition and heard Mr. Rafelson tell the casting director that he wanted no part of the former flying nun. Ms. Field, who says she came to the audition dressed in character as the movie's ''little tart,'' impulsively slipped the receptionist a note for Mr. Rafelson in which she bragged explicitly about her sexual prowess.

''It was what the character would have said,'' Ms. Fieldinsists. And it got Mr. Rafelson's attention. ''I'm not the kind of man who will decline that kind of note,'' he recalls, ''I said, 'Send her up immediately.' ''

After several more auditions, Ms. Field got the part. ''I still didn't think Sally was the sassiest, sexiest actress I could have gotten,'' Mr. Rafelson says. ''But she had the most talent.''

Six years ago, Ms. Field realized she had hit a different kind of industry wall: her age was working against her. ''It's been very gradual,'' she says of the difficulties facing older actresses. ''But it started creeping up on me and I started preparing. It's just been fewer and fewer roles. Women over 45 tend to get lost in this industry. It's not something I dwell on; it's just a fact. So I decided to look for another way to tell stories outside myself and stay in the game.''

To that end, in 1994 Ms. Field began working at the filmmaking lab at Robert Redford's Sundance Film Institute, first as an acting adviser to student filmmakers and then in other aspects of production.

She is now on the board of the institute and works at the lab with students for several weeks every year. In 1996 she was the director, executive producer and co-writer of a television movie called ''The Christmas Tree,'' starring Julie Harris. Two years later she directed an episode of her friend Tom Hanks's miniseries, ''From the Earth to the Moon.'' ''I wanted to fall in love with directing and I have,'' she says. ''Now it's just about becoming really good at it.''

Ms. Driver and her sister Kate, who produces many of her movies, brought the ''Beautiful'' script to Ms. Field, who was drawn by its strong roles for women. And she saw parallels between Ms. Driver's character, Mona, a working-class woman who sees beauty pageants as the only escape from her troubled past in a dysfunctional home, and her own life.

Unlike Ms. Field, who appears to be a devoted mother to her sons -- Peter, 30, and Eli, 28, by her first marriage and Sam, 12, by her second -- Mona is ruthless. As she single-mindedly pursues her goal of winning a pageant, she allows her own daughter, played by Hallie Kate Eisenberg, to be reared by her best friend (Joey Lauren Adams), whom the child is led to believe is her mother.

Ms. Field elicits an especially strong performance from Ms. Eisenberg, 7, as a tough little girl who suspects Mona is her true mother. Ms. Field ''used all the tricks and tools I've learned as an actor'' to help the soft-spoken Ms. Eisenberg speak up forcefully. ''We would scream at each other so she could learn to shout back at Mona,'' Ms. Field says. ''She knew I wasn't really angry at her. It helped her come up with the right emotions.''

But, Ms. Field says, there are many similarities between herself and Mona. ''I empathized with her need to win and how as a child she goes to this fantasy world to escape her family,'' she says. ''But like a lot of us, she puts a cloak on as a child because it's cold in the house, and keeps it on even when she grows up and doesn't need it anymore.''

Ms. Field grew up in a show-business family. Her mother was the B-movie actress Margaret Field, and her stepfather was Jock Mahoney, a successful stuntman and the star of the 1950's television show ''Yancy Derringer.''

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Most interviews with Ms. Field over the years have included stories about the domineering six-foot four-inch Mr. Mahoney, who was, Ms. Field has said, capable of tossing her across the yard in a fit of temper. ''He was a big, loud, uh, colorful person,'' she says dryly. ''You were either the world's most wonderful human being and should be anointed in oil or you were an absolute harlot and should be boiled in that oil.''

Nevertheless, Ms. Field says, she does not harbor bitterness toward her stepfather, who is now dead, and credits him with toughening her up. ''I was a thorn in his side because I was a fighter,'' she says. ''I decided if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I decided to be as big and bold and ugly as he was.''

BUT some of her friends and colleagues -- like the actresses Kate Capshaw (whom she hikes with) and Goldie Hawn and the Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz, a former junior high and high school classmate -- say it took a while before Ms. Field truly became big and bold.

One of her oldest friends, Madeleine Sherwood, 78, a retired Broadway and film actress who played Mother Superior on ''The Flying Nun,'' says Ms. Field ''had an air of desperation'' when she was younger.

That desperation may have come from her dislike of working on ''The Flying Nun,'' a job that entailed such indignities as agreeing to fly through the air on a wire at the second Golden Globes awards ceremony, in 1965, and landing in John Wayne's arms.

Ms. Sherwood recalls that Ms. Field ''smiled so much back then -- this big grin all the time.'' But she says Ms. Field is ''not that concerned about pleasing everyone anymore.''

During the last season of ''The Flying Nun,'' it was Ms. Sherwood who forced Ms. Field to audition at the West Coast branch of the Actor's Studio, of which Ms. Sherwood was a member. ''Sally said she wanted to do more but was afraid,'' recalls Ms. Sherwood, who played opposite Ms. Field in the audition scene that won her acceptance into the studio. Ms. Field adds, ''And she made sure I kept studying there as well.''

Though she went two years without a job after another short-lived sitcom, ''The Girl With Something Extra,'' her part in ''Stay Hungry'' led to her Emmy Award-winning role in the television drama ''Sybil'' that same year.

Soon Ms. Field was on her way to movie stardom, complete with high-profile romances like her stormy five-year relationship with Burt Reynolds, with whom she co-starred in ''Smokey and the Bandit'' (1977) and ''Hooper'' (1978).

''More than anyone, she's paid her dues,'' says Robert Benton, who directed her in ''Places of the Heart'' and who watched her give her infamous ''You like me!'' acceptance speech after receiving the best actress Oscar the next year.

Of that speech, which has entered Hollywood lore as one of the Oscars' most cringe-inducing moments, Mr. Benton says: ''She just voiced what a lot of people really feel but would never say when they win. She's not as cynical as the rest of the world. But she's as smart as they come. Reinventing herself over and over as an actress, a producer, a director, she's a textbook case of how to stay alive creatively.''

Reinvention comes at a price, however. And her need for people to like her -- or at least to like what she does -- has not entirely gone away. When Ms. Field, who is currently single, took her old friend Ms. Sherwood to the premiere of ''Beautiful'' at the Toronto Film Festival this month, Ms. Field was ''dreadfully nervous'' about how the audience would react to the movie, Ms. Sherwood says.

''I could feel waves of tension emanating from her while she sat curled up in the seat next to me,'' she says. ''I was tense too. I kept reminding both of us to breathe.''

Events took a bizarre turn when Ms. Sherwood and some of the film's producers spotted Burt Reynolds, who is currently filming a movie in Canada, sitting quietly in the same row as Ms. Field during the movie. Ms. Sherwood says he never came over to say hello, and Ms. Field says she hasn't seen him in more than 15 years.

''We weren't going to tell her Burt was there, but after we left, a man out on the street shouted at her that Burt was still inside,'' Ms. Sherwood says. ''She was startled, to say the least.''

When Ms. Field is asked about the Toronto premiere, she admits that she felt slightly overwhelmed. Suddenly, she sounds very much like the giddy woman at the Oscars in 1984 who wanted people to like her and was thrilled when they did.

''I had my little Madeleine by the hand,'' she says of Ms. Sherwood. ''It was all a big blur. I just kept holding on tight.''